A forthcoming collection of essays seeks to (re)engage the question of"moral Chaucer."

Chaucer's immediate successors credited him with "pleasance" coupledwith "sentence," and some compared him with the great moralphilosophers Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca. For later generationsChaucer would come to be distinguished for his geniality and ironicdetachment in sharp contrast to the dogmatism and dullness of so manycontemporary moralists. Only recently (notwithstanding the exegeticalcriticism of the mid-twentieth-century) have critics begun tore-examine and describe Chaucer's "ethics."

The collection will be a timely contribution to the so-called ethicalturn across the disciplines which has so far influenced modernistscholarship rather more than medieval studies. Major proponents ofethical theory and criticism (e.g., Nussbaum, McIntyre, and Booth onthe Anglo-American side; Ricoeur, Levinas, and Irigaray on theContinental side) confine themselves to reading ancient tragedies andmodern novels. With few exceptions they ignore periods in between.One purpose of this collection is to generate a wider dialogue onpostmodern ethical theory and premodern culture.

The editor is seeking work that especially foregrounds theoreticalissues and explores connections between Chaucer and any of thefollowing:

• the ethics of psychoanalysis• feminist ethics; the ethics of sexual difference• narrative or discourse ethics• neo-Aristotelian or virtue ethics• developments in late medieval moral philosophy• the reception of "moral" Chaucer• moral dilemmas and decision-making• ethics and aesthetics• didacticism